In the Print data, wouldn't it be better to have Beacon list the "Buildings" according to the printer's assigned "Building" instead of the Building (AD "Office") assigned to the user's AD record? The AD user's "Office" is useful data when you're looking at a specific printer, but not so useful when you're trying to get data for a whole Building.

An Example. All these "Buildings" are actually different offices within the same Building.

These "Buildings" are actually the "Office" field from the AD records for the users. Depending on the organization, the "Office field in AD is going to be filled in a variety of ways and may not be consistent at all, rendering the current list by "Buildings" almost completely useless. The data only because useful when the Print Admin advances to Device and selects a specific printer.

In the image above, the letters "KIM" in the Building name indicate offices in our "Kimball" building. I can get Print usage/analytics for those individual offices or persons, but not for the whole "Kimball" building. In Fleet Manager I can assign/set printers to be a specific Building, but that assignment isn't used in the Print data.

It's good that Beacon pulls AD information. However, that information in the AD may not be all that useful to the print administrator at a whole "Building" or "Area" view. (in my opinion)

Also, most Print Admins using Beacon would also be Print Admins that are using Pharos, correct? Would the AD User info for the Students be populated with the "Office" field? Not ours. This means I have a HUGE total in the "Unknown" building. What good is that? If the data was shown by the printer's assigned "Building", then it could be useful data.

The location hierarchy in Fleet Manager and Print Analytics are the same: Region, Site, Building, Floor, and Area, but the context of those assigned locations is different. Because Fleet Manager is collecting data from devices themselves, the assigned location represents the physical location of that device. In other words, if 'Device XYZ' is assigned the building 'Kimball', that means that it is physically in that location. Print Analytics by contrast is the document / print user view of the data and represents the location from which that document was created. For example, if a person assigned to the 'North Building' printed to a physical device in the Kimbell Building, Print Analytics would show that the device received a job from the 'North Building'. In this regard, when you look at a device in Print Analytics, you are looking at the locations of the print users who printed to it, a valuable piece of information for many customers.

One of the features we are working on is a 'Unification' of those location concepts so that you could see both the physical location of a device and the location of users that printed to it. Today we have both sets of those data, but are presented in their respective locations of Fleet Manager and Print Analytics.

The other point you raise is related to the challenge of aligning the data collected from Active Directory with those that drive the Print Analytics explorer. If the office AD field aligns with the building level in the explorer, then that is how the data will be viewed when you explore on it. Another option that is available in Beacon to potentially simplify this alignment is the import of a csv file containing the names and locations of print users. The process for doing this method is documented here> Print User Info.

Perhaps the unification of device and document location will give us the opportunity to better display student print by location, because as you point out it will by placed in one large group when viewed by location.